Saturday, May 10, 2014

Helping verbs

Imagine that a stranger walks into your room and says:

  • I can.
  • People must.
  • The Earth will.

  • Do you understand anything? Has this person communicated anything to you? Probably not! That's because these verbs are helping verbs and have no meaning on their own. They are necessary for the grammatical structure of the sentence, but they do not tell us very much alone. We usually use helping verbs with main verbs. They "help" the main verb. (The sentences in the above examples are therefore incomplete. They need at least a main verb to complete them.) There are only about 15 helping verbs.

    No comments:

    Post a Comment